From tfa: "In looking at the share of each OS in the total market, Nielsen found that the BlackBerry OS continued to lead with 31% at the end of August, followed by iOS at 28%. However, while the BlackBerry OS has declined in share from 36% in January and iOS has remained steady, Android has climbed from 8% to 19%, Nielsen found."

So "most popular" means most new purchases over a six month timeframe, not overall share of the OS, where Android still lags behind iOS and Blackberry. Bit ambiguous there.

Isn't every Chrome release a beta anyway?
It's always going to be a beta until their vaunted HTML5 becomes a set standard. Paul, this is the reason why enterprise cloud usage is not gaining as much popularity as you think they should. Tell me, do you recommend that people run locally-installed applications on beta code?

Is the smartest thing I've seen in a long time about judging the relative positions, and "velocities" of competitive products, "phones" in this case.

Look particularly at the vector graph he shows. Android, and soon Windows Phone are not tied to a particular hardware vendor, so you need the vector sum of all the hardware vendors to see where Android is going as a single entity.

The vector sum does not point in the same direction that Apple's does. He doesn't show the data for all the Android phones, but viability requires that the vector has to point in the first quadrant, ie, increasing profits and increasing marketshare. The slope can vary, but that's where you have to be.

The problem for the hardware phone makers is that they'll find themselves in an even faster race to the bottom than happened with PCs. Whether it is Android or Windows Phone, there will be little to distinguish one hardware model from another save price. Even then, it's a minor issue, because the real cost is the contract.

That's why the Android:iPhone and Windows:Mac analogy doesn't hold up; the cost model is very different.

What I Use

Like many, I was hoping to see a new Lumia flagship before the end of 2014, and while I was pleasantly surprised in some ways by both the Lumia 735 and 830, neither offers the level of performance or best-in-market camera quality I had come to expected from Microsoft/Nokia's high-end devices. So I pulled the trigger on an unlocked Windows Phone flagship that will hopefully take me through at least the first half of this year. Or until Microsoft gets off its low-end fixation and satisfies the needs of its biggest fans....More

It's been a while since the last What I Use, but there haven't been many major changes since late last year: Surface Pro 3 has become my go-to travel companion, I've added a third cellphone line for testing Windows Phone, Android and iPhone side-by-side, and have rotated through some new tablets and other devices. We've also switched from FIOS to Comcast and added to our set-top box collection....More